The Heavens Declare

Hey friends, Alan Doody here, preaching pastor at New Life. We're delighted to bring you this sermon from our Sunday gathering. For more information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net. Thank you and enjoy the following message. Children. Children, where are you? You here? Raise your hand.

Okay, children, I need your help. I'm going to sing a song. You have to fill in the rest of the song. Okay, you ready? Twinkle, twinkle. Hey, some of you were not children who just said it. All right. Children, okay. Little star, how I. Very good. All right.

Good job, children. Now, some of you may have been like, I'm 11. I'm no longer a child. I'm too cool for Twinkle, Twinkle. I have outgrown. Some of you may think you've outgrown Twinkle, Twinkle, but one thing that's interesting is there are some people who never outgrow Twinkle Twinkle.

They never outgrow it. They're obsessed with it their whole lives. And the reason they love Twinkle Twinkle and they kind of stick with it is because they take it seriously. So think about the words. I mean, like, why do stars twinkle? How big are they? How far away are they?

Are they moving close to us or away from us? Why are there so many? Those are big questions. One such person is my friend, Dr. Jennifer Wiseman. She's an astrophysicist at NASA up in Maryland. And so the astrophysicists are the ones who say twinkle, twinkle is our mission statement.

We take it very seriously. They love stars and they spend all their time thinking about stars. Jennifer was one of the people who helped to create the Webb Space Telescope. That's a radio telescope, and you have to put it in orbit around the Earth, and it looks out on the universe.

And I think you should be able to see a picture here. So, yeah, there's Jennifer up in the upper right. And then this is one of the pictures from the Webb Telescope. That is the Eagle Nebula. That is, it's this big collection of a cloud of dust and stars, and it is 6,500 light years away.

And this telescope can see that far. That's twinkle, twinkle, right? It's a lot of stars. One thing that's cool is Dr. Wiseman, she won a big award a few years ago. This is actually her at Texas AM a few years ago. She came to Texas AM because she won this big award.

And she told me, she flew from Maryland to Texas. She landed in the airport in Houston, and she told me, she said, oh, when I landed in Houston, I knew immediately this is a city that cares about stars. How many of you are from Houston originally? Okay, does Houston care about stars?

Yeah, of course. So Houston has NASA's Johnson Space Center. They care about stars. Yep. And even the. The word astro, the word astro is Greek for cheater. I mean, wait, no, no, that's. Sorry. Let's just move on. It's Greek for star. Ha ha. Okay. Yeah. All right. No, but the reason Dr.

Wiseman said she knew she knew Houston loved stars because she liked, she steps off the airplane, you go up the little jetway, and she stepped into the airport, and the very first thing she saw, there's one of those kiosks in the Houston airport that's selling t-shirts, and she saw t-shirts, and on the t-shirts it said, the stars at night are big and bright.

Oh, I heard it. Someone did it. So if you don't know what just happened, it's four claps. Clap, clap, clap, clap. Deep in the heart of Texas. Very good. So she said, I know I'm in the right place. The stars at night are big and bright, indeed. So she got here to Texas AM, and she gave this big talk to the student body.

And she showed pictures like this. And she began her talk with a different song, not Twinkle, Twinkle, not Deep in the Heart of Texas. But she began her talk with Psalm 19.1, saying, she showed an image like this, and she said, The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

So when you see these stars, there's a lot of stars up there, and God knows every single star by name. In Psalm 147, it says, He determines the number of the stars. He gives to all of them their names. Great is our Lord and abundant in power. His understanding is.

Beyond measure. So God knows every one of those stars by names. And Jennifer said, the more you look in the telescope, the more you understand the heavens, and the more you hear them declaring the glory of God. She basically said, Psalm 19 is a psalm you can't get over.

You'll never get to the point where you're like, okay, I understand that. Psalm 19, that the heavens declare the glory of God is one that will stick with you your whole life. So I want you to all take your Bibles. Like Pastor David said, we're right about in the middle there.

Please feel free to take notes. You can write right in your Bible. And if you want to say, like, I'm going to just take this Bible from New Life and write it right now. Go ahead. You're welcome to it. God loves it when we write in our Bibles because that means as you write and you take notes, it goes into your head.

Okay, so take a look at Psalm 19. This is a Psalm of David, a Psalm of David. David, of course, we think of as both a shepherd and a king, right? He started as a shepherd boy. He lived around 1,000 years before Jesus, 1,000 BC. He was a shepherd boy, the youngest of eight sons, but then he becomes the king.

And many of the psalms that we have in the book of Psalms come from David. Sometimes you can't really tell, but sometimes you can say, like, oh, this is clearly a psalm that reflects his time as a shepherd, like Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd, right? In this psalm, you can imagine David out under the stars, taking care of his sheep, writing Psalm 19 and singing it there.

So this is Psalm of David. I want you to look at this first verse closely. The heavens declare the glory of the Lord. Of God, the sky above proclaims his handiwork. There are a couple of churchy words here. Have you ever noticed like when the Bible says the heavens, you're like, are you talking about heaven or are you talking about like the sky?

In this context, we are indeed talking about the sky. Actually, in verse 1, where it says the sky above, that phrase the sky above, it actually means the expanse. It's the same word that we use in Genesis 1:6 through 8. And you know how the sky looks like a big blue canvas stretched out across, like a painting?

That's what the expanse means. So we actually are talking about the sky, the sun, moon, and stars. But of course, you know, for the psalmist, it's not just the heavens that declared the glory of God. Last week, Pastor Allen preached on Psalm 98, and it talked about how the land, the sea, the rivers, the hills, and all that dwell in them glorify God.

So the creation, the physical creation, declares the glory of God. Okay, the other churchy word you may see here in Psalm 19:1 is the word glory. That's a very churchy word, so it's like, well, what does that mean? Whenever you hear someone talk about God's glory, really what it means is a proclamation of his excellence, his beauty, his wonder.

So you can think of that as God's greatness. God is great. God is excellent. God is awesome. And it also has the connotation of God's goodness. God is great, and God is good. Both of those. That's what we mean whenever you see and talk about God's glory. Great.

So the first thing I think we can take from this psalm is something that may seem obvious to us, but would not have been obvious in David's time. So the first question. That we can ask is, what's surprising about the psalm? What's the first thing we can learn?

The first thing you learn from the psalm, one of the things David almost certainly had in mind, is that the creation is not God. The creation is not God. And you say, like, I know that. I know the creation is not God. But what about all the countries around Israel?

They would look at the sun and the moon and the stars and say, gods. They would look at created things and say, God. And David's like, no, that's not right. The point of the physical creation is to point you to God. It's to point you to God. The sun, moon, and stars are not gods.

They are physical things made by the one true God, and they're meant to point to him. This same issue shows up in Genesis 1. So when you read Genesis 1 about the creation of the world, you have to read it not just as a 21st-century American, but to think, what would someone in the ancient Near East read this as?

They would say, well, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, they say that the moon is a god. You read Genesis and it says the moon is not a God. The moon is a light. It's made by God to function as a light to light the night. So seeing that distinction of the sun, moon, and stars, the physical creation, these things are not God.

They're made by God for a function. And one of their functions is to point to Him. This is the heart of all idolatry: when we treat the creation as if it's ultimate. Every good thing in your life, everything you're tempted to worship to make ultimate, those good things in your life are not ultimate.

They're meant to point to the True God. The second thing we can see from Psalm 19 is that the creation is loud. The creation is loud. This is kind of a strange thing, the idea that you like, I looked in the telescope and it yelled at me. That's basically what it's saying.

The creation declares. Look at verses 2 through 4 there in Psalm 19. It says, Day to day pours out speech, night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.

This is the idea of what we as believers call general revelation. God revealing himself in a way that everybody sees. You can distinguish that from special revelation. That's when God speaks through his prophets, through his word, through the Bible. General revelation is God revealing himself in a way that everyone can see because it goes throughout the whole earth.

You see the same thing in Romans 1. You can see Romans 1, 19 through 20 here. This is a very famous passage. You can kind of connect this with Psalm 19. Paul writes, What can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.

For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. I want you to see what a paradoxical passage this is. God's attributes are invisible, but you should be able to clearly perceive them.

You're like, well, which is it? How can I clearly perceive something that's invisible? What Paul is saying is the same thing that Psalm 19 says, which is that we can look at the physical world, the physical creation, and see that it points to God. This is a somewhat controversial point.

Because how can the physical, visible creation, things we can see, like clouds and the moon and the sun and the stars, how can those things point to something invisible? So, what do we call the study of the physical world? What class is that in school? Science. We call that science.

You will sometimes hear people say the sentence, science cannot prove God, period. You'll hear people say that. We're going to amend that slightly today. What I want you to write down is: science cannot prove God, comma. Okay? So, technically, it is true that science cannot prove God, and the reason that's true is because science only studies the natural world.

Science is the study of the natural world. Science can't study the supernatural world. Point being, you can't go do experiments on God. And the Bible actually says you should not attempt that. It says, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. So, you shouldn't try to run experiments and say, I'm going to scientifically understand how the supernatural works.

Science is the study of the natural world. So, in your notes, say, science can't prove God, comma, but it should make you very suspicious. What that means is when you use science to study the natural world, you should say, like, hmm, something's going on here. So, David is saying exactly that, that the creation, if you study the creation, you study the physical world, that's proclaiming something loudly, like, hey, maybe I should take a look at something.

What is this implying? David is thinking about creation's beauty, its wonder, maybe even thinking about creation's contingency. I know that's a big word. What that means is that the creation didn't have to be here. It didn't have to be here. It used to not be here, and now it's here.

Why? Because there is a powerful God behind it. David may also be thinking of creation's precision, the fact that the creation is created in such a precise and beautiful way. I'm going to give you an example of that. We actually know even more now about how precise our universe is.

A few years ago, the Australian astrophysicist Luke Barnes came and spoke here at Texas AM, and he talked about the idea of fine-tuning. Fine-tuning. What is fine-tuning? Fine-tuning is the idea that the properties of our universe, all the little constants that govern our physical scientific laws, are precisely tuned to exactly the values that they have.

And if they were different than what they are, then we would have a universe that would be very boring and not have much in it, not much life. I'll give you an example. There is a force. I know all are like, this is more science than I really signed up for.

Too bad. If you get me, this is what's going to happen. So there's a force called the strong nuclear force, and this relates to how protons and neutrons bind to each other. And if that force was a little weaker, We would have a universe of only hydrogen. Only hydrogen, no life, nothing complex, pretty boring.

But if that same force were just slightly stronger, you would have a universe with almost no hydrogen. Again, life impossible. And it's like very finely balanced. It has to be exactly the value that it is. And it turns out there are like 40 different numbers like this. You change that number, no carbon atoms.

You change that number just a little bit, stars can't form. And there's all these numbers, and eventually you start to say, like, huh, this is this is like, it seems like all these values are exactly what they need to be. Just to give you an example, imagine you and your friend need to get into a safe.

There's a safe that's locked. And you're like, how are we going to get in? And your friend goes, and he puts in the three numbers, has the combination, opens the safe. And you think, like, huh, did he get lucky? I don't know. Now imagine you go to another safe, and it has 40 different dials on there, and your friend goes, and then opens the safe.

And you think, I don't think my friend just got lucky. I think he actually knows the combination, right? So the way you should think of it is: modern science has proved that our universe has all the dials turned to life. And that ain't no accident. I'll give you an example.

This is a quote from a famous British astronomer who's not a believer. His name is Fred Hoyle. And Fred Hoyle says: A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkey with physics. As well as with chemistry and biology. He doesn't know it, but this is basically: you do a lot of science and it starts to make you suspicious.

So Fred Hoyle is saying, like, yeah, I just, you know, I do science, and it seems like there's some kind of super brilliant intellect with intention and power that made chemistry and biology and physics the way they are. And we, as believers, say, uh-huh, what do you want to call that?

What word would we have for a super intellect like that? This is what I mean: that the more you study science, the more it should make you suspicious that there's something going on, that there is a God who is powerful and brilliant behind it all. Third, and you may have to tell me to calm down on this third one.

Third is that God wants us to study and know the creation. Psalm 19:1, the heavens declare the glory of God, has an implicit, look at the heavens, go look. So, Psalm 19:1 is effectively a cheering session, cheering section for the web telescope. Like, oh, awesome. We get to see more of the creation, we get to put a loudspeaker up to creation and see how it declares the glory of God.

Now, if you're like, I'm not into stars, I'm not an astrophysicist, maybe there's something else in creation that makes you say, Wow, God, you're amazing. So, one of the cool things about the Psalms is that the Psalms are meant to provide a model for us on how to praise and how to pray.

That means David is very okay with you saying, like, I'm going to write my own version of Psalm 19:1, and so that's what we're going to do: blank, declare. The glory of God, David would say, What would you put in the blank? So I want you to think about it.

What is it in our physical world that makes you say, like, wow, God is awesome? Blank declares the glory of God. Each one of you may have a different answer. I'll never forget hearing Pastor John Piper, he spoke on the topic: Can watching a documentary about insects be a worship experience?

Some of you who've watched the Planet Earth series may say, like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, because you may think, like, insects, they're gross, who cares? But, like, in reality, like, when you see the way the little ants signal to each other or work together, you're like, it's amazing.

That Planet Earth series has one session where they show millions and millions of monarch butterflies all crowding together in Mexico. And you just can't even imagine what it would be like to be there and see that all these monarch butterflies flying around you. Can watching a documentary about insects be a worship experience?

They can. Those monarch butterflies declared the glory of God. Those ants declared the glory of God. Another time I heard Pastor Piper speak about the diving bell spider, which I recognize is not an insect. For everybody, I'm going to get nasty emails. Like, actually, yeah, anyway. So, if you hate spiders, I'm about to show you a picture of a spider.

I'm not a big fan of spiders, but this one is awesome. So, are you all ready? You're going to get a picture of a spider. Okay, here we go. Spider. Okay. This is the diving bell spider. I want you to see this thing. This spider lives its entire life underwater, but it carries around with it, you see this little bubble?

So it has little hydrophobic hairs on its legs and on its abdomen, and it carries this little bubble around with it, so it's like a little scuba diver. And it lives its entire life underwater, and it carries its air around with it, and occasionally goes up and kind of refills its air.

Isn't that awesome? Like, if you see that, you're like, God's amazing. The diving bell spider declares the glory of God. And the number of things we can put in this list of like, this declares the glory of God, that declares the glory of God, the more you study, the more you will say, God, you're amazing.

I mean, if we took, if we, let's imagine we take that thing over to the university and say, all right, students and faculty, can you make a robot that does that? I'm a faculty member at ANM, and I can tell you for sure we would be like, oh boy, give us a few million dollars in a few decades, and we might make like a loser version of the same thing.

And to be honest, we would cheat off of this one and just copy what that little spider is. So God makes things that we can't even conceive. All right, I'm going to show you what this means for me. I'm going to show you a picture of a material that I work on.

All right. This is a microscope image of a single atomic layer of graphite. So you see that it's like, it looks like chicken wire, kind of, right? Like there's these little holes. So what I want you to see, so the black part, that means there's nothing there, and then the red, do you see that these are little hexagons?

One, two, three, four, five, six points all connected. Each one of those little red points is a carbon atom. I want you to think about what this means. If we took this image and sent it back in time to the great scientists of the past, to Kepler and Faraday and Pascal and Kelvin, and we said, check it out, here's my image.

They would say, like, you have a microscope picture of carbon atoms? They would weep. They would weep. They would say, I cannot believe how blessed you are to live in an era where you have microscopes that can see the building blocks that God used to make the world.

They would say, you are truly blessed. The atoms declared the glory of God. Children, I think I can come up with an illustration that may be helpful to you. Children, how many of y'all like Legos? Me? Absolutely. All right. Yeah, good. Imagine you walk into a room. There's a huge room like this room.

And you walk into this room and there are amazing, huge Lego creations everywhere. Like a huge six-foot-tall, you know, recreation of Kyle Field. And then there's an Eiffel Tower and a big working truck with wheels and everything. And it's all made of Legos. And you're like, wow. And at first you're amazed.

But then you go and you start looking closer and you say like, how did you do that? Oh, oh, I see. Oh, I see what you did there. I see how they did that. That's awesome. And you can tell the creator of this giant Lego Kyle Field, like, oh, I I see what you did there.

That's what science is. It is looking closely at the way God has put the world together and saying, oh, I see what you did there. That's awesome. That's what science is. One more aspect of science that I think pushes us toward God is the fact that science works at all.

Why is it that our puny human brains can figure out the way that the world works, the physical laws that underlie the world? Why does that work? How is it that the world operates in a mathematically consistent, predictable, and beautiful way that we can use our puny minds to figure out?

The early scientists had a fundamental core belief about that question. I think you can see that in this quote from Johannes Kepler. Look at this. Kepler says of the scientific laws, he says, These laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.

So this means the foundations of all of our scientific enterprises, the foundations of science, are built on the idea that God made the world, God made our minds, and God wants us. He wants us to use our mind to understand the world. He wants us to look in the microscope.

He wants us to look in the telescope because when we do, we know something about him because those things we study proclaim his excellence. And if you go and you discover something, let's say you get the telescope and you see a star no one has ever seen before, you're actually the second person to see that star after God.

And you see this star and you say, oh, wow, oh, I see what you did there. And God's like, yeah, it's awesome, isn't it? That's what science is. I will ask you: do Christians have a reputation for being pro-science? Not exactly. The reasons behind that are complicated, but for us here today, I think all I can say is let's not let that slander be true of us.

Wouldn't it be awesome if a place like the Texas AM Physics and Astronomy Festival was overrun by Christians going to every experiment and saying, like, that declares the glory of God. The volunteers are like, they just told me that the Vandegraaff generator declares the glory of God. What was that about?

It's true, it does. Children, I want to talk to you in particular. This is a good moment to walk in. Don't let, so I'm serious. Don't let anyone ever tell you that science is anti-God or that God is anti-science. Because Psalm 19 says the opposite. God loves it.

Take a look back at your Bibles. So, what you see, we've been through the first four verses, verse five and six, we're going through the sun. And all of a sudden, we have this crazy left turn at verse 7 where it starts talking about the law of the Lord.

And you say, whoa, we just completely changed. So, this last thing that I want to see here in Psalm 19 is that God's greatness points to his goodness. God's greatness points to his goodness. As you read Psalm 19, you're like, I thought we were talking about the heavens.

Heavens and the sun and moon and stars, and all of a sudden we're talking about God's law. For David, the two are connected. If there's a great God who made the universe, that great God who made the universe is also the good God behind the moral law in our hearts.

David says, in verse 7, he says, The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever.

The rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. And some of you may be thinking as you read that, like, wow, David, you really love God's rules. And you may think, like, why? I don't know. I tried reading Leviticus and it was kind of a slog, and I don't know, it's a really long list of rules.

Like, why does David love God's rules? And so I think we sometimes have in our minds, when we think of God's law or God's rules, we just think of this like giant list of thou shalts and thou shalt nots. But that's probably the wrong way to think of it.

This word for law in verse 7 is Torah, kind of like the same word as Torah. God's law is not just rules on how to behave in order to get out of trouble and avoid punishment. God's law is, whenever you hear that word Torah, it's God's comprehensive guide to life.

It's a blueprint for how to flourish as a human. And it's a reflection of his character. The same God who's so brilliant to design that diving bell spider. He has a design for you too. And if you follow his ways, his laws, you will flourish. David doesn't act like God's laws are a big pain, like a big list of things to follow.

Look at these verses again. Look at these words that show up. David says, revived, wise, rejoicing, enlightened. And David says, I want to live like that. That's a flourishing life. That's how I want to live. In verse 11, David says, and keeping them is great reward. So instead of thinking of God's law as like a big long list of things you have to follow, instead think of God's law as a blueprint for how to live your life that is in keeping with God's character.

And if you follow God's law, you will flourish and you will not regret it. That's what David means when he thinks about God's law. And he says, God's greatness I see in creation is connected to his goodness that I see in his law. However, when you think of the idea of a God who is so great he can make the sun and moon and stars.

And he's so good that he has a law, a way for us to live, for a lot of us, we think like, ugh, and kind of recoil at that. And sadly, there are a lot of places in Scripture where people are confronted with the glory of God, and their immediate response is not praise or embrace.

They say like, ugh. And the reason they hesitate is because they know that they're. Not following that law and that they are broken and sinful. There's a passage in Isaiah 6 where Isaiah sees the glory of God. He has a vision of the glory of God. And his immediate response is to say, woe is me.

Maybe even a more stirring picture of the same thing is the first miracle that Peter sees. Jesus does a miracle, and there's this miracle catch of fish. And instead of Peter saying, like, awesome, Peter doesn't say awesome. He turns to Jesus and says, depart from me, for I am a sinful man.

Sometimes in response to a God who is great and is good, we think like, oh, depart from me, for I'm a sinful man. Here in this psalm, David doesn't do that. Is David a sinful man? He is. He did a lot of awful things. But the Bible describes David as a man after God's own heart.

Boy, I would like to have that phrase applied to us, men and women after God's own heart. David says in verse 12, who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgressions.

So David doesn't approach God with a posture of fear, but rather with a confidence and a belief that God is forgiving and gracious to him. If you look at verse 12, some of you may have a different translation in English. In the ESV, it says, Declare me innocent.

That's like in a courtroom sense, declare me innocent. But these other verses, or these other translations, may say cleanse. So, this is asking God for forgiveness. Declare me innocent, cleanse me from my sins, and save me from the dominion of sin. So, David believes that God is not only great, he's not only good, but he's going to show us grace.

And that's why he doesn't recoil and run away from God, but he runs to him. Two weeks ago, we heard about Psalm 32, another Psalm of David, where it focused on, David says, Blessed is the man whose sin is forgiven. So, you may ask David, like, how do you, like, why is God going to forgive you?

How do you know this? It's because David knows God's character. Now, I will tell you, David does not know the full story of how God is going to forgive us, how God is going to save us. So, I want you to imagine: what if David were here? David were here with us.

I think David would be delighted because we could show him some telescope images. He'd be like, check it out, David. And he would be like, Yes, the heavens declare the glory of God. He would be pumped. But the other thing we could tell David is we could say, David, I know you count on God for forgiveness, but how can God forgive us?

Turns out God's plan of salvation involves your great, great, great, great, great, great grandson, someone from the line of David, who's not only human, he is God incarnate. God sends Jesus to die for our sins and be resurrected. And this is the heart of his plan to save us from our sins.

This is the Reason when you find out that there is a great and good God, you don't have to run away. But like David, you can be confident that you can go to God and ask for forgiveness and that God will be gracious to you. David would be like, David would be, honestly, David would be jealous of us.

He would be like, wow, you have your telescope images, amazing. And you get to hear of the full plan of salvation. This idea is actually in Scripture. Jesus tells the disciples, Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly I say to you, many prophets and righteous people, like David, long to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.

So David would say, Wow, you are truly blessed to have microscopes and telescopes that help us proclaim, put loudspeakers on the creation to declare the glory of God. And you get to see the full swath, the full plan of God and his mercy to show us grace. Normally, this would be a good place to stop the sermon.

But I have to tell you something. So I think I've told certainly all the college students this. Since early 2003-ish, I've been plagued by what I can only describe as like existential panic attacks, like worried that God's not there, that he doesn't hear my prayers, and that he won't be there after I die, right?

This is not born out of any argument. No one like made an argument to me to make me worry about this. It was born purely out of just anxiety and worry. And so, in the middle of a very depressing winter in Boston, late 2002, early 2003, it was really hitting me hard.

Thankfully, by mid-2003, I'd really been brought out of that to a large degree. So, it doesn't happen to me very much anymore. And then the frequency of those kind of panic attacks went way down after I got married. A good example of how God has used my sweet wife as a grace in my life.

But about three weeks ago, three weeks ago, I had one of these attacks. And I was irritated. I was like, God, why do I have to deal with this? You know, it would be great is if you would just like communicate yourself really loudly so I don't have to worry about that.

And in that moment, the Holy Spirit brought to my mind the words of Psalm 19:1, that the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. In that exact moment, it was like I was praying, Lord, speak loudly. And the Holy Spirit brought scripture to my mind saying, God speaks loudly.

The reason I'm telling you this is because I don't want you to think that the Bible is something that you just like Google for information. It's not just a source of data, it's something that we read scripture, it goes in our minds, and the Holy Spirit brings it to our minds in the exact moment that we need it.

It's one of those great ways that God shows us grace. So, whatever it is that's plaguing you, maybe it's a sense of guilt, maybe it's skepticism and worry that He's not there. We're not left to our own. The Holy Spirit uses Scripture to speak directly to us and give us what we need.

God knows that we're like inconsistent and worrisome and anxious, and He is patient with us in the midst of all that. So I have to tell you that because it literally came up in the preparation of this sermon. I pray the same thing for you. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you for Psalm 19.

I thank you for our brother in Christ, David. I pray that we would each have a heart like his, a man after your own heart. I pray that be said of me, everyone here. I pray that you would mold our minds so that we are not blind, we're not deaf to the creation around us, that we see evidence of your grace toward us day in and day out.

We thank you that even though you are perfect in every way, that you are patient with us, that you love us, that you are gentle and lowly, that you advocate for us, and that if we come to you, you will never cast us out. Lord, I pray this next week, I pray today, today, that everyone here, that their eyes will be open to see the beauty of creation, see the bees and the flowers and the clouds, and say, We see.

Serve a great God. Please rescue us from all the distractions the world has for us and let us see you as you truly are. In your name, I pray. Thank you for listening to the sermon audio from New Life Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. For more information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net.